


Conflict of Interests

by Leamas



Series: Striking Out Alone [2]
Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: Gen, Kondraki family drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:09:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16019528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Father and son meet at a diner for coffee and lunch and an overdue chat.





	Conflict of Interests

It was late in the afternoon when Ben finally pulled off the highway. There were only a few other cars parked outside the diner, and two parked for the gas station. At first he didn’t do anything. He didn’t turn off the engine or turn down the radio or take off his seatbelt, and certainly he didn’t get out of the car. It was such a bright day that he couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows of the diner; and the ground was so flat that he could see another car on the horizon, driving towards him from a distance, but the desert was so expansive that he could only guess at how far away it actually was.

He knew why he was here, but not what he was waiting for: a sign or something in his gut to tell him that he should get a move on, that he should finally park the car and go inside; or that he should leave. A bad idea didn’t scare him but the wrong idea did, and although the air was bright and open he still had the sense of something closing in on him. This had not been his idea. But there was something here that he wanted.

The car that he’d been watching on the road drove closer. The sun reflected so brightly that it hurt to look at. And Ben heard the engine. He heard how the engine slowed, how it crept towards the turn and pulled off the highway. He watched it park on the other side of the parking lot, in front of the diner, and watched as a man with black hair stepped out into the light.

He cast a glance towards Kondraki and nodded, then turned and walked into the gas station. Kondraki stopped the car. By the time Draven had come back Kondraki was standing next to his son’s car, the sunlight pricking his skin and the hot dusty air clinging to him. Draven opened the back door of his car and threw whatever he’d bought from the gas station inside.

“You made it!” he called. The hand that was still holding his keys swung at his side while the other stayed tucked in his pocket. He wore a loose t-shirt that lay bare his skin, tanned and dark enough that he looked like his mother, and the tattoo on his arm that had once made Kondraki’s stomach twist.

He’d spent a long night after Draven showed him that tattoo wondering if he’d made the right choice. It was his old task-force’s insignia. Kondraki supposed that he ought to have felt proud—proud that Draven had made it, at least; proud of how far Draven had come, and of all the hard work that he’d put into the Foundation that was finally paying off. He’d been happy for Draven, but he’d never been proud. His son had been marked. He wore the Foundation on his skin, and in the tracker embedded into his spine. It never sat right with him.

“I hope it didn’t take you too long to get here,” Draven was saying. He stopped a few feet in front of Kondraki.

“You should know,” Kondraki said. “Or did you forget how to get back?”

“I thought I would,” Draven said absently. “I wondered if it wouldn’t turn out to be some sort of memetic infohazard, and whether one morning I’d wake up and just not remember.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“No,” Draven agreed. “I figured that. Do you want to go inside?” He gestured behind him, to the diner. Kondraki studied Draven’s face—how at ease his son looked. He’d taken after Clef, always something of a natural chameleon. Even when he was tense, or when situations were dire, Draven still looked like he belonged in them. Everything from how he held himself to the way that he moved his arms, the way that he watched the world with such studious attention, from behind his own eyes, made Draven look like he’d prepared for this exact moment.

Whatever that moment might be.

Kondraki didn’t know why it surprised him to see that Draven was just the same now. He didn’t look out of place at all, and he still looked so much like how he had the last time that Kondraki had seen him—almost five years ago now. Draven was in his thirties, with crow’s feet in the corners of the same brilliant green eyes that had looked out at Kondraki as a child in wonder, and looked to Kondraki for answers when he came to live with Ben after Mónica died. Oh, there were a few new scars on his face that weren’t there before, and even as he smiled serenely it now looked like he was trying not to grimace, but Kondraki knew that he was very much looking at Draven. Everyone at the Foundation likes to think that they’d know if something was possessing or impersonating their loved one, and Kondraki knows that he’d probably be no better. As he looked at Draven, though, he knew that what he saw couldn’t be faked. It crossed Ben’s mind that he could turn around right now and get back in the car and drive away, and he clenched his fist instead so that he wouldn’t do that. What had he expected? To see the ghost of his son looking out from a stranger?

“Dad,” Draven asked, hesitantly, and Kondraki’s gut gave a particularly hard twist in two different directions.

“You want lunch?” Kondraki asked.

“I’ll pay,” Draven said, his shoulders easing. He gestured towards the diner. They started walking across the dusty old parking lot.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Really,” Draven said. “It was me who asked you to meet me.”

They were met by a cold blast of air as they stepped inside. There was a bell. Everything about the diner looked like how Kondraki thought a diner in the Nevada desert should look, with the checked floor and posters of old cars and movies on the wall. It all looked so clean, without a speck of dust anywhere to be seen except on the other people sitting there. An older white woman in a leather jacket sat at a table with a cup of coffee in front of her. She was frowning down at her iPad. In one of the booths were two black men. The one with his back to the door was talking, although Kondraki didn’t hear him over the noise that the fan made.

Draven waved to the teenager reading a book behind a counter and soon both Kondrakis were also sitting in a booth, and then that teenager was bringing over the menu and telling them about the offer that was running.

“Do you want a minute to look at the menu?” this kid asked. He was rocking forward on the balls of his feet, and smiling very aggressively. “Or are you ready now? Do you want something to drink before I come back to take your order?”

“Coffee,” Kondraki grunted. He skimmed the menu.

“I’ll have a coffee, too,” Draven sad. “And a milkshake.”

“Give me your house burger, too,” Kondraki said, realising that they’d be setting themselves up to be interrupted about five more times if he didn’t order now. “Everything on it, hold the mayo.”

“It’ll be extra for bacon. Do you still want that?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have the same,” Draven said, handing the menu back. Kondraki parted with his menu as well. Then they were alone. Heard the coffee machine starting in the background.

“How is everyone?” Draven asked. “How’s Clef?”

“He’s alive.”

“I’m glad to hear that. And Joe? Angelica?”

“That’s classified,” Kondraki said. “I couldn’t tell you that even if I knew.”

“Yes. Of course. Still walking within the Foundation’s boundaries,” Draven said with a weak smile.

Kondraki felt a flutter of annoyance. “When it suits me.”

“So this…?”

“I’ve told the relevant people what they need to know,” Kondraki said. “That’s all I’m telling you.”

“So no one knows that you’re meeting me here,” Draven said. “But do they know that I’m still alive? Did you tell them that? Or does everyone think that I’m dead by now? I’m just wondering. It doesn’t change anything, but I want to know where I stand.”

“Where you stand with me, or the Foundation?”

Draven shrugged. “I don’t think that you told anyone that I’m alive.”

Their coffees arrived, and when their server left Draven watched his back; watched as he went back to his book. Every second that Draven didn’t look at Kondraki was a raised notch on an internal dial that Kondraki did his best to keep an eye on, even if he couldn’t always keep it in check. He wrapped his hand around his piping cup of black coffee. There was no single moment that put the thought in Kondraki’s head but with a clarity that he’d developed since Draven vanished, Kondraki saw himself reaching forward and taking Draven by the shoulders and shaking him.

And then Draven would look at him, and he’d be Ben’s son again.

Then Draven looked at Kondraki, with his own eyes, and he still was Kondraki’s son. Just like he’d been in the parking lot. The dial kicked back down again. The rest of his face was a closed door, although a glass door. He was on edge, that much was clear. The malice that had never been bled from Kondraki took a moment’s delight in that.

“What makes you think I didn’t tell anyone about you?”

“It isn’t in your nature.”

“I’m still head of site,” Kondraki said. “You don’t get that far if you have a glaring conflict of interest.”

“They wouldn’t have let you come,” Draven said. “Not alone, anyway. Look outside. I’d see if there was anyone with you.” Then, very casually, he added, “I don’t think you’d have wanted anyone to get involved with whatever this is.”

“And I didn’t think that my son would defect to the Serpent’s Hand.”

“Oh,” Draven said, “that wasn’t my choice. Not at first, anyway.”

Kondraki exhaled slowly. It didn’t change much about the situation, but after all that time he’d spent insisting that Draven hadn’t run it was good to be proven right.

“Did you all think that was what happened?” Draven’s voice was light, like this was just a question of passing interest. Kondraki would have thought Draven sounded amused, if he was a stranger and didn’t remember how Draven actually sounded when something tickled his fancy.

“There was speculation that you and one of our researchers ran off together.”

“In a way that’s what happened,” Draven said. “I saw her leave site, and I followed her. It didn’t take long to realise that she was defecting, or for the others to realise that they’d been followed. The rest is history.”

  Kondraki waited. The part of Draven that learned from Clef how to look out through his own eyes while he waited patiently for his moment to act averted its eyes from Kondraki. It shuddered, and grimaced, and finally said, “I don’t think you have terrible intentions, you know. I don’t think that any of us did.”

“You’re going to have to be clear about who this ‘us’ is,” Kondraki said.

“The Foundation. You, Clef, Dr Gears—the rest of my task force, whatever happened to them. We all had very noble intentions,” Draven said. “What’s more noble about saving the world, right? Protecting humanity, I think.”

“I don’t give a fuck about humanity,” Kondraki said.

“No,” Draven said curiously. “You were always just interested in how the world worked, weren’t you? You were curious. You wanted more than you would have ever had otherwise. That’s why you dropped out of your PhD program to travel. You could have learned a lot in a formal setting like that, sure, but it wouldn’t have been the same as what you did learn instead. What you learn in the wild isn’t something that you can recreate in a controlled setting.

“So when the Foundation came to you with an offer to experience something else,” Draven said, slowly, hesitantly, as Kondraki let him speak uninterrupted. “Something that they wanted to keep the rest of the world from ever knowing about at all… It seems obvious, what choice you’d make.

“I don’t think that that kind of curiosity is any less noble than wanting to save the world, you know. But it’s too bad.”

Kondraki stayed quiet.

“You had such noble reasons for signing up, but how much could you ever really learn sitting in a lab? How does anything that the Foundation knows hold up in the rest of the world? You don’t control it all. All that the Foundation can do is take anything anomalous it finds and put it in a cage, and poke it with a stick. What do you learn from that?”

Kondraki stayed quiet.

Draven repeated the question.

“What?” Kondraki growled.

“You learn what happens when you stick something in a box and poke it with a stick.”

They both sat quietly. Eventually Kondraki asked, “Who told you this?”

Draven stared at Kondraki, then shook his head. “No one told me anything. It’s just my perspective, now that I’ve had a chance to look at it from a distance.”

“Look. I can’t judge you on what’s noble or not. Personally I think you’re giving me too much credit for why I do what I do. But you can’t judge ground conditions from above. Come on, Draven. I thought you’d remember that,” Kondraki said. He lowered his voice. “You used to kill children to preserve normality. Just six weeks before you bailed.”

Draven drew a breath. He sat back. “That wasn’t—”

“Here’s your burgers. Which one of you didn’t want mayo?”

Draven looked up at the man. Something in his expression had shaken loose. When he spoke his words were slow. “Neither of us wanted mayo.”

The kid looked surprised. He looked down at the tray he was holding. “Oh. Well, one of these has mayo—I can take it back and get you another one… Who ordered the milkshake?”

Kondraki pointed at Draven, who nodded his agreement. A milkshake was set down in front of him. The burger without mayo was placed in front of Kondraki.

“I’ll just take the other one,” Draven said. “It’s no big deal.”

“Are you sure?”

Draven nodded. The plate came down in front of him. He stared at it like he didn’t know what to do with it. The waiter left. Draven reached for his milkshake instead.

“Should’ve ordered a Pepsi,” Kondraki muttered darkly to himself.

“I didn’t kill children because I wanted to,” Draven said. “It made sense at the time why I did that, but now—”

  “Yeah,” Kondraki said. “Now that you don’t have to get any more blood on your hands, it looks like a really bad idea.”

“I have blood on my hands. Nothing I say now changes that.”

“But you don’t have to do it anymore,” Kondraki said. “You can talk about how it’s really not necessary to do maintain normality and protect humanity, when there are other people out there doing the hard work for you.”

Draven glared at him. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Do you?” Kondraki demanded. “You sound like someone who joined a cult.”

“You sound like someone who hasn’t left one yet,” Draven countered. “How screwed up does your head have to be if you think that killing children is necessary? Who first told you that the _unspeakable things_ that you took part of were necessary?”

There was a time when a comment like that would have elicited a reaction stronger than anything Kondraki could imagine doing now, although he could still imagine it. His hand in Draven’s hair, his hand reaching for the gun and pointing it at his son and asking if Draven wanted to repeat that; a maniacal grin slowly crossing his face as he asked Draven what he knew about the things that he, Benjamin Henrik Kondraki, no longer even remembered.

That smile still sat on his face, amused and hateful; all of this came from a time when he couldn’t have imagined that Draven would say a word of this. Once, he couldn’t have imagined that Draven would ever stand outside of the Foundation and look back at him, and once that thought had caused him pain.

“What did they do to you?”

Draven had the look of an exhausted task force member putting on a brave face while danger was still within sight. Even now, Kondraki could see that he hadn’t shaken the ways that he was taught to navigate the world. “They did more for me than you could understand, Dad.”

“All right,” Kondraki said. “So I won’t understand.”

“Dad—”

“You wanted to see me.” Kondraki took a bite of his burger. “Why was that?”

“I wanted to explain.”

“You just said that I couldn’t understand.”

“I didn’t leave you by my own choice,” Draven said. “You know that, right? I wouldn’t have left you. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ever seen it like this. And you have to believe me—there’s so much more than sterile white walls out here.”

Kondraki shrugged. “I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. What did you want, though?”

“I don’t want anything,” Draven said. “To see you. That’s it.”

“I don’t believe it. No amount of brainwashing could make you voluntarily start trying to convert someone,” Kondraki said. “What are you, some kind of Mormon? You remember what I did when they came to the door. I’m the stubbornest man you’ll ever meet.”

Draven looked stricken. And he looked like he wanted to say something else, although he didn’t. Kondraki knew that he wouldn’t, so he just shrugged again and tucked into his meal. “Are you coming back with me? Double-defecting?”

“Dad—”

Just at that moment Draven’s phone rang. He looked at it, then looked at Kondraki. Kondraki nodded, and watched Draven pick it up and hold it to his ear. He stood up from their booth and started towards the door, stepping outside so that he could take it. Kondraki watched him.

Ben wasn’t surprised when Draven put his phone away and hurriedly walked over to the car.

Kondraki waved the server over again. It took a moment, as he was getting the bill for the two men in the corner. Kondraki watched, irritated, as the one who paid made small talk with the kid, while the other finished one phone call and started making another. Finally the server came back to Kondraki, who said that he wanted to pay for everything now and that he’d leave once he finished Draven’s what Draven ordered, too—if he could just have a knife to scrape off the mayo.


End file.
